Workplace distractions cost the US economy an estimated $650 billion per year, according to a 2026 Gitnux report. The average knowledge worker now loses close to 4 hours daily to interruptions and task-switching. This article covers the latest workplace distraction statistics for 2026, including focus rates, productivity costs, top distraction sources, meeting overload data, and what the numbers say about remote and hybrid work environments. Workplace Distraction Statistics — Key Highlights...

My nephew just graduated high school, and wants a laptop. When he decides what computer to buy, price (or more precisely, value ) is the most important attribute. Apple's MacBook Neo upended the 'value laptop' equation—Apple's not supposed to be both the cheapest option and the best value... but it seems like that's squarely where the Neo landed for the good-but-cheap laptop category. My nephew is also my godson, and to kick off his computing journey, I thought I'd let him choose f...

Summary: People have tried extending rock-paper-scissors to more than 3 options, with some success. If you allow more pairings to be ties, this uncovers a rich garden of different game dynamics and strategies. As far as a battle of wits go, it’s hard to find a more balanced game than rock-paper-scissors. Its simplicity means that all strategy is scraped away, and all that’s left is to cold read the other person’s soul. Come, stare into my eyes, and I’ll see the weapon you’ll ...

Where is your intelligence located? In your brain? It is a simplistic answer. A better model is that your intelligence is embodied. Consider a cook working at an expensive restaurant. He has all his favorite knives and cooking instructions, placed exactly where he wants them. His kitchen is part of his intelligence, of his skills. The same cook working in your kitchen can probably cook better than you do, but he can’t reproduce the same meals he would prepare in his favorite kitchen. We ...

M1 M2 M3 L $T 2.0 $100 bills 0.12 $50 bills 0.22 $20 bills 0.05 $1, $2, $5, $10 bills + coin 3.0 Household demand deposits at commercial banks 0.4 Household demand deposits at credit unions + thrifts 3.4 Business + government + foreign demand deposits 5.3 Savings deposits — passbook + statement + online 4.0 Money market deposit accounts — MMDAs 1.0 Interest-bearing checking — NOW + ATS accounts ...

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation. When I finish an agentic session, I get all the outward signs of having written code, but none of the internal processes that happen when we write code by hand . As a quick primer, the human brain has several types of memory, short-term, working, and long-term. Short-term memory gathers information temporarily and processes it quickly, like RAM. Long-term memory includes t...

“But in the end it’s only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass.” ― The Lord of the Rings There aren't many interesting stops on the 4-hour drive from Westport to the Abel Tasman National Park (apart from the overall high New Zealand baseline). However, the T-Rex Tree is a low-key spot I had to check out. Just imagine the Jurassic Park music and a big roar, which I won't share here for copyright reasons. Roaaaaaaaar! The Buller Gorge is an actual touristic s...

All tests were executed against Kafka 4.3.0 using Dimster .  In the last post we used simulated consumer processing time to reveal how important it is to set an appropriate value for max.poll.records to ensure the consumer parallelism that we expect. With a uniform distribution of messages over partitions, the rule of thumb was a value somewhat lower than: group.share.partition.max.record.locks / number of consumers per partition But the...

The ASTC texture compression format has its “integer sequence encoding” to send small integers with a uniform probability distribution within their range. When that value range is [0,2 k -1] for some integer k, this is straightforward: just send the values with k bits each. But ISE ups the ante by supporting not just power-of-2 sizes ranges, but also allowing a single prime factor of either 3 or 5 in the size of the range. So we can, for example, have some value x in the range [0,95], 9...

What Garnet Chan cares most about is basic science. He entered chemistry decades ago to understand some of the most consequential biochemical processes on Earth. But since then, he’s become a central figure in a different arena: the debate over whether quantum computers will have a decisive advantage over ordinary “classical” ones. Over the past decade, many quantum computing researchers have… Source What Garnet Chan cares most about is basic science. He entered chemistry decades ago ...

Hello, It has been some time, and we're happy to share some news with you today. 2.1 plan We have been working on the major 2.1 update for Factorio and Space age for the last 8 months, and it has been shaping up quite well. Scope and expectations Generally, we are happy with the game design of Factorio and Space age. The progression is good, things are mostly well balanced (one or two exceptions), and there isn't anything we feel is majorly missing. That is to say, we d...

Little’s Law states that in a stable system, L = λW, where: L = mean number of customers in the system λ = mean arrival rate W = mean time a customer spends in the system The law holds regardless of arrival or service distributions, number of servers, or scheduling discipline. Why It Is Surprising Little’s Law holds without any assumptions about the distribution of arrival rates or service times. It does not matter whether arrivals are Poisson, deterministic, or correlated,...

Welcome to May’s Interesting Links ! This month saw the Current conference in London with the usual 5k run , lots of familiar faces and friendly conversations—and plenty of excellent breakout sessions too. It seems live-tweeting conferences isn’t a thing any more, with only myself and Thomas Cooper seeming to post anything, but if you want you can go review the hashtag feed on BlueSky for some highlights of the conference. Welcome to May’s Interesting Links ! This month saw the...

The next few months will be a blur in the run-up to Local-First Conf and the Lab Day we’re hosting. All our teams are busy prepping the work they’d like to show, polishing features, planning demos. Yet despite the race to hit these milestones, we’ve also published a fresh round of lab notes. In this edition of the Dispatch, we have a handful of notes from the Patchwork team, plus a note about the technical & social design behind Tenfold. Patchwork Lab Notes Are Back Patchwork is our ...

At the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen in 2025, Kent Beck and I spent some time on stage talking and answering questions from the audience - a format I refer to as “two old geezers on a park bench”. We talk about our experiences with LLM-augmented programming (at that point - October 2025), we show our frustration that things we’ve been saying for thirty years still need to be said, we say how anything like a manifesto reunion needs to be led by a younger generation, and opine on what jun...

The trigonometric Fourier series is a beautiful mathematical theory that shows how to decompose a periodic function into an infinite sum of sinusoids. These are my notes on the subject, with some examples and the connection to linear algebra in Hilbert space. Coefficients of Fourier series Let’s assume that is a well-behaved 2L -periodic [1] function and that we can find coefficients a_n and b_n such that: \[f(x)=\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\left(a_n cos\frac{n\pi x}{L}+b_n sin\frac{...

Note: The logic described in this post may be a stepping stone to a more robust system in the future. Please keep that in mind as you read and know that my solution may not be optimal, rather a start toward solving a problem. This morning I opened Artemis and found a website I had been following for a few months had published almost a dozen posts today. The website was now, unfortunately, a zombie site . This experience left me with two questions: What should Artemis do if a site publishes sign...

Rishabh emailed me the other day, asking me to answer the 7 questions of his new blog challenge, and who am I to say no to such a request? So here we go. How was your first experience with AI models? I assume by AI models we mean the current crop of LLMs, and not AI models in general, because I’m old enough to remember when “Machine Learning” was a thing. What even is AI anyway at this point, since everything is lumped together into one useless definition? Anyway, I believe my first e...

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 today. My favourite thing about it is this note in the release announcement: Users will find Opus 4.8 to be a modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor. There’s still more to be done: we’re working on developing and releasing models that provide many of the same capabilities as Opus at a lower cost. It's so refreshing to see an AI lab honestly describe a release as a minor incremental improvement over the previous model! Honesty seems to...

This was posted at about 01:30am so it's probably full or errors but whatever I never back out of writing a post all in one go. If I've spoken to you in the past week, I probably mentioned playing around with Plan 9 . After getting an old PC on ebay for 30€ (~40€ with shipping) I thought "if I was ever going to install this, now is the time". Shout out to Matt for the hint of what to look for to get real cheap used PCs on ebay; which we talked about a bit on an IndieWeb pop-up about B...

This is going to come as a shock—a SHOCK —to some of you, but I harboured a not insignificant obsession with liners when I was a teenager, both of the ocean and air kind. I loved reading about commercial ships and planes of yore, learning about how they were operated, and contrasting them to how we get around today. Some of my favourite tomes were technical reference manuals and so-called “coffee table” books that explored these incredible machines. You could keep your books on cars and...

Cadey What is an operating system, really? Aoi I mean, isn't it obvious? It's something like FreeBSD or Fedora that has a kernel, userspace, graphics stack, core set of programs, and everything else you need to be able to use a computer. Is this a trick question? Numa Well it depends, is the Nintendo Switch OS an operating system? It doesn't have a shell in the same way FreeBSD does. Is SEL4 an OS? It doesn't ship with core utilities. Is Linux an OS? Is Windows an...

Warfare today is increasingly defined by systems that can operate on the edge. Interest in autonomy for unmanned systems continues to grow, particularly for capabilities such as GPS- and comms-denied operations, autonomous mission execution, and teaming across platforms.    While the case for autonomy is clear, committing to a larger autonomy effort upfront can still feel high-risk. Before deploying autonomy in the field, customers need proof that autonomy will work reliably on their own s...